The 'Wood Man'

Author

File Description

xx22

Posted on 04/30/17 @ 11:57 AM (updated 05/06/17)

File Details

Map Size:

200x200 (Small)

Difficulty:

Normal

Made with version:

1.2

Minimap:

The king has commissioned you to produce a certain amount of meat and cheese to celebrate his daughter's wedding. The wooden man is seen in terms of a military base as a joke figure. Your enemies will try to erase the camp from the map. Show them that they are wrong!

Playability: 4.5
This was a fun little scenario. It's a relaxing way to spend an hour or two. You start in this pleasant wood fortress with not a lot in it, and you have to stuff some buildings in it and next to it, and you have to figure out how to navigate the wooden walkways. You've got a few fixed defenses to make your life more interesting during the attacks, such as irreplaceable pitch ditches, caged wolves, a fixed number of siege engineers, and some siege equipment at the back of your base, all very nice. Also, you start with a well. A very suggestive well. Curse you, well...

Balance: 3.5
I won this on very hard on the first attempt. The enemy did break through my walls on the last attack though. Also, I think I came in just before what was supposed to be a pseudo time limit that the player is not warned about, so I was probably cutting it close in multiple ways. It was actually pretty funny, my castle caught on fire while I was waiting for the last load of meat from the hunter - if he had burned up on the way to the granary I probably would've lost, I was lucky enough that he had a clear path to the granary.

Creativity: 4.5
I like the idea of this scenario! It took me a while to realize that I wasn't just occupying an elaborate fortress made of wood - it is literally a wooden man. I thought that that was just a nickname for the lord since he had for whatever reason opted to build his entire castle out of wood, something of an anachronism. The way the siege equipment is integrated into the castle and the fixed defenses add to this score as well.

Map Design: 4.5
The landscape around this castle is fairly well done. I took off points for the rocks - in the future, if you don't want weird lines through your rocks, wait to put the rocks in until after you've put in all your cliffs, and then don't go back in and adjust the terrain they're sitting on, because the rocks will move, and the individual pieces of the rocks won't move together. Also I'm not sure what I think about the raised areas on the sides of the river. It looks okayish, I'm not sure if it was intentional or not. Otherwise, the castle itself is extremely well done, those are pretty complex wooden walkways you have going on there.

Story/Instructions: 4
The story does its job. I think the king must've been planning this wedding several years in advance though, perhaps this was an arranged marriage xD. The origin of the wood man is left out, which leaves me curious - I think this is actually a good thing.